July 28, 2019
It has become clearer than ever that Trump, faced with the escalating likelihood of impeachment, is pinning all of his hopes on fanning the flames of hatred. A disgusting racist who has never been shy about expressing his contempt for Black people, Trump has decided that condemning those in Congress who criticize his policies or investigate his corruption in explicitly racist terms is a “winning” strategy.
Yesterday’s target was House Oversight Chair, Congressman Elijah Cummings. Last week, Cummings excoriated acting DHS Secretary, Kevin McAleenan, for conditions at the border. Rep. Cummings challenged McAleenan’s contention that DHS was doing its best, asking, “ What does that mean? When a child is sitting in their own feces, can’t take a shower?” (Source: “Cummings tears into DHS chief for conditions at border facilities,” by Owen Daugherty, TheHill.com, 7/18/19).
In response, Trump called Cummings’ district a “ disgusting rat and rodent infested mess…[where] no human being would want to live.” Journalists rushed to correct the false factual assumptions in the tweets, with articles detailing its above average per capita income or its high percentage of Black college graduates. These well-meaning articles, though, were missing the point. Trump is speaking to an audience who cannot be persuaded of the essential humanity of nonwhite people, no matter how many citations to the American Community Survey you throw at them.
Too many people believe that the citizenship of non-white Americans is conditional. They believe that all Black and brown people are presumptively criminal and poor, and demand that we prove otherwise. Too many people expect all white spaces — Ivy League schools, first class airplane cabins, community pools and Starbucks (!) and resort to vigilante justice when those expectations are not met.
Over 25 years ago, Critical Legal Studies scholar, Professor Cheryl Harris mined American legal history to demonstrate that whiteness was a property interest that white people zealously fight to protect (Source: “Whiteness As Property,” by Cheryl I. Harris, Harvard Law Review, Volume 106, No. 8, 1993). Her scholarship built upon W.E.B. DuBois’s original observation that white working class voters were “compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage…because they were white,” (Source: Chapter XVI: “Back toward slavery,” Black Reconstruction, by W.E.B. DuBois, 1935).
This is the basis for the significant percentage of people who would never murder Black churchgoers in cold blood, or ram their cars into a crowd of anti racist protestors, but whose vision of their world— their communities, their workplaces, their leisure space, is monochromatic — and will fight to keep it that way.
The truth is there is no appeasing those who doubt the humanity of Black, Brown and Indigenous people. There is no middle ground between those who seek a multiracial, representative democracy and those who seethe with resentment at any Black achievement. There is no third way in which to reconcile the interests of those who believe that refugees deserve to seek asylum in the United States and those who sneer at brown children being tortured in detention camps. It is long past time to face the fact that there are now only two kinds of people in this country— those willing to remedy the fact that the advantage of many is built on a foundation of stolen property and those willing to destroy this country in order to keep it.